Socialist Party Australia - Unite campaign in New Zealand

Matt McCarten interviewed about Unite, the grassroots community trade union in NZ that fights the exploitation of casuals. SP-initiated Unite in Australia has copied the name and many of its ideas

From the NZ Listeren July 26-August 1 2003 Vol 189 No 3298
Matt McCarten
by Alex Spence
Of all places, this is where Alliance president Matt McCarten resurfaced almost a year after his party's humiliating exit from Parliament: leading a picket outside Showgirls, an Auckland strip club.
This is McCarten's new mission, as secretary of Unite, a union for low-paid workers, and he was representing a group of cleaners who he claimed had been unjustifiably dismissed. The fact that the workers were employed by the sex industry generated a small amount of publicity, but McCarten says that it was "just another dispute. They're just workers. Our point of view is that we're not going to turn away any case of injustice." Still, routine dispute or not, from Bowen House to the red-light district is a bit of a comedown, isn't it? "I think it's a promotion," he says with a laugh.
Long before McCarten was involved in parliamentary politics, he was a trade unionist, beginning in his early twenties as a delegate for the Hotel and Hospital Workers' Union. It was natural that he would return to his roots. "[Leaving Parliament] doesn't mean your political work stops," he says. "They have a saying in the Philippines which I've always liked: 'We've now been elected to the parliament of the streets.'" To McCarten's way of thinking, the Alliance, in attempting to remain an obedient junior coalition partner, forgot about the people it was supposed to represent – the poor and working class – and sacrificed its support base as a result. He's now attempting to rebuild it from the ground up, creating a union for low-paid, semi-skilled and unskilled workers. "There's a whole class – about 400,000 New Zealanders – who get less than $10 an hour," McCarten says. "They go from one shit job to another. That's okay when you're in your twenties, but if you're still in your thirties and you're still on that sort of money, how could you own a home or support a family?"
Of course, building a national union with significant political influence will be an immense challenge. Eighty percent of the New Zealand workforce is now deunionised, and in some of the more casual, transient industries, such as hospitality and retail, that figure is closer to 100 percent. An entire generation who grew up post-Rogernomics have entered the workforce with no concept of unionism. Traditional trade unions have been forced to merge and consolidate, focusing on historical areas of strength such as teachers and large industrial sites. ("That's understandable," McCarten says, "but it's a defensive strategy.")
Not having unions to fight for their rights has cost workers dearly, he says. In real terms, low-income workers earn on average $120 less than they did in 1984, he claims. He rifles through his files and produces figures for restaurant workers as an example. In 1984, by today's dollars, a restaurant worker could expect to earn $12 an hour.
Today, they receive on average $8.50. That's $340 a week compared to $480. And today's restaurant workers get few of the benefits enjoyed by their counterparts of 20 years ago: no overtime, no penal rates, no travel, uniform or laundry allowances. UNITE WAS A REGISTERED union before McCarten came along: it was based in Wellington, with a few hundred members, but had little structure and no fulltime staff. McCarten says he was attracted to the inclusiveness of its membership policy – Unite is open to anyone, regardless of the industry that employs them – so he took it over, setting up headquarters in Auckland at the Trades Hall on Great North Rd. His office is small, with a view over dim, wintry Grey Lynn, and on this afternoon his daughter Kate is helping him with his finances – a contrast, one can't help thinking, from Parliament.
He is experimenting with a new approach to recruitment. The traditional trade-union model of signing up workers by a particular industry won't work, he says, because low-income earners gravitate towards semi-skilled and unskilled jobs; they often work more than one job, and change jobs frequently. He decided, instead, to recruit on a suburb-by-suburb basis, beginning with Ponsonby and Grey Lynn. ("Because it's close," he says.) Rather than deducting membership fees from members' wages, Unite takes its weekly $1 fee from their bank accounts.
The response? Positive, he says. Seven out of 10 workers in the sites he has approached have joined. After three months, Unite has more than 1000 workers; his initial target was 2000 for the first year.
Part of McCarten's strategy is to involve the local community in employment disputes. "It's about the community taking some responsibility," he says. Instead of workers taking industrial action, McCarten's tactic thus far has been to picket and leaflet offending businesses, trying to appeal to their customers to take their business elsewhere. That's what he did to Showgirls. Another recent example: he recently received a tip-off that a migrant worker in a restaurant in Auckland was working seven days a week, sleeping in the back of the kitchen, taking showers every morning at the local YMCA and getting paid only $120 a week. He threatened the owner with a picket and "of course, it got fixed in about 30 seconds flat". The community will take responsibility if made aware of situations such as these, he says. "If I had a picket on a restaurant and I told anyone, 'Look, I'm doing this because there's someone here earning $120 a week and working so many hours he has to sleep here', if I appealed to the community not to eat here tonight, how many New Zealanders would say, 'Bugger you, mate'? No. They'd say, 'Outrageous!'" There is, however, an obvious limitation of his suburb-by-suburb strategy that quickly became apparent.
Although it's easy to target small "Ma and Pa" employers, it's not those small operations that dictate the market rates. Rather, "it's the multinationals down the street". (McCarten says it would be "impolite" to name specific companies, but a certain global coffee chain is mentioned frequently.) "You're hitting up the smaller players to pay more, but they're paying more, anyway. They might be paying $12 an hour, you go in there, hit them up to $14 and that's great. But down the road they're paying $8.50 [at a multinational chain]. And there are thousands of people employed by those outfits. So you think, 'Shit, I should be [going after] those guys, too.' If you want to walk the talk, you've got to do the hard stuff, which is the big corporates." In other words, you can't improve the wages and working conditions of an entire community without improving the wages of workers at the major chains within that community, and that means negotiating at a national level with powerful executives in corporate head offices. Which also means the task is a lot bigger than McCarten envisaged. "You've got that right, brother," he says, smiling.
Does McCarten long for a return to parliamentary politics? He shakes his head. "It's not like I was ever a parliamentarian. I wasn't an MP. My role doesn't particularly change. And, you know, I've been tied up in electoral politics for a long time now, so this was a chance to re-educate myself [in street-level politics]."
Looking back, he says the Alliance's electoral defeat was inevitable. The split over whether to send troops to support the US-led war in Afghanistan in late 2001 was merely the breaking point. "The writing was on the wall around the time we signed the coalition document," McCarten says. "I always thought it was a mistake" not giving Labour a clear set of non-negotiable demands from the outset. "By not specifically declaring why we were in government, we were never going to have a story to take into the election."
There were successes, such as Kiwibank and paid parental leave, but they were seen as government initiatives rather than Alliance ones. And the Alliance, wary of the electorate's swift punishment of New Zealand First for breaking up the previous coalition government, became more and more wary of attempting to distinguish itself. "Our MPs, particularly our senior MPs, became more and more tied up to the government and not the party. The party became a nuisance."
Ultimately, the Alliance failed. "The poor are still poor. They're just as badly off as they were [before the Labour-Alliance government]." He adds: "I think there's a desperate need for a party of the left that is very clear [about its objectives and its constituents]. The Alliance was too apologetic. It wanted to be all things to everyone, and that's Labour's job. The future for a left-wing party is: it's got to have street cred, and it's got to keep it. And you don't do that by putting out press statements. You've got to walk that talk. That means getting up at 5.00am, when people are getting the sack. Will that ultimately have an electoral impact? Possibly. Will I still do it even if it doesn't? Yes. Why? Because it's the right thing to do."
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